Biotech

In a small initial test in people, researchers have shown that a single infusion of a novel gene-editing treatment can reduce cholesterol, the fatty substance that clogs and hardens arteries over time.The experiment was carried out in 10 participants with an inherited condition that causes extremely high LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol levels, which can lead to heart attack at an early age. Despite being on cholesterol-lowering medications, the volunteers were already suffering from heart disease. They joined a trial in New…

The signal doesn’t necessarily have to be a visible color change—the team has also experimented with temperature. A second receptor pathway in these engineered plants responds to diazinon, an insecticide that’s currently banned for residential use in the United States. As part of the same study, the team used diazinon to turn on the plant’s normal ABA signaling, triggering a stress-induced increase in leaf temperature that can be seen by infrared night-vision cameras, similar to what the MIT team had tried before.The…

Lawrence Faucette, the 58-year-old patient with terminal heart disease who was the second person to receive a genetically engineered pig heart, died on October 30, according to a statement from the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where the transplant was performed.Faucette received the transplant on September 20 and lived for six weeks—less time than the first recipient, despite extra precautions by the Maryland team. Initially, Faucette made progress following his surgery. He was doing physical…

Zepbound’s approval was based on trials run by Eli Lilly that included 2,539 adults with obesity or excess weight and weight-related medical problems other than diabetes, according to the company. In those studies, people taking Zepbound who also made diet and exercise changes experienced substantial weight loss at 72 weeks compared with those on a placebo. At the highest dose of 15 milligrams, people taking Zepbound lost an average of 48 pounds. At the lowest dose of 5 milligrams, people lost an average of 34. Those…

Meanwhile, Hanna’s team in Israel was growing mouse embryo models in a similar way, as they described in a paper in Cell that was published shortly before the paper from Zernicka-Goetz’s group. Hanna’s models too were made solely from embryonic stem cells, some of which had been genetically coaxed to become TSCs and XEN cells. “The entire synthetic organ-filled embryo, including extra-embryonic membranes, can all be generated by starting only with naive pluripotent stem cells,” Hanna said.Hanna’s embryo models, like those…

While the startup cofounders considered hoppy-tasting but hop-free beer potentially beneficial to brewers and the environment—as Denby said in a New York Times story after the paper was published—some hop farmers felt threatened. They feared engineered yeast could end a farming tradition and hollow out the soul of brewing, a dance of microorganisms, farmers, brewers, and hops stretching back to the 11th century.Denby declines to talk on the record about the antagonism, which caught the company by surprise, but news of the…

The new paper is the result of herculean computational analyses, involving researchers in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, to better understand the role ancient retroviruses play in early embryonic development—how they harm, and how they help. It sprang from work Singh had done as a PhD student at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, when he gathered datasets from 11 studies to painstakingly trace individual embryonic stem cells from fertilization to implantation.He ran an analysis that grouped cells based on the…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. As regular readers will know, I tend to start each edition of this newsletter by telling you all about a topic that’s been on my mind—whether it’s a big news story, a fascinating trend, or just something cool I happened to hear about in my reporting. This week is a bit different. It’s my last Checkup for a while. In a matter…

A man wearing a mask walks past a Nvidia logo in Taipei, Taiwan.Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesChipmaker Nvidia will invest $50 million in Recursion Pharmaceuticals to speed up the development of the biotech firm's artificial intelligence models for drug discovery, the companies said Wednesday. Recursion's stock soared 80% following the announcement. Shares of Nvidia, which have helped to fuel stock market gains this year amid hopes about its AI computing chips, rose more than 2%. Recursion uses AI-powered models…

Next, they got patients from a hair transplant clinic to donate follicles, then grafted those healthy hairs onto mice. Follicles normally undergo a sort of shock after a transplant, going dormant for a couple months. Plikus suspected that osteopontin could rouse the grafted follicles faster. Thirty days after grafting, some of these mice received osteopontin injections. Twenty days later, only those mice had sprouted human hair.So far, the lab’s new paper has been well received—at least when it comes to the conclusions…